I'm a mac user but pulled an old PC out, fresh installed Win98 on an oldish PC I had in the closet & all Win updates, installed the BB software from CD-ROM, and then backed up my BB..

Then I tried to install the .319 update. Everything seemed to work okay until the "Waiting for hardware initialization" (I think it is called this--it's the 3rd or 4th step, right before Radio software)

It was at "Waiting" for one hour and my BB screen was blank. I saw that it might take 20-30 minutes but I literally waited an hour. I tried hitting the power button on the device, but nothing. Then I yanked the USB cable from the device with hope that it would abort and fail gracefully. The software installer on the PC immediately aborted and now all my BB does is repeatedly flash the red light twice when the battery is installed. Other than that it is totally unresponsive.

I just got off the phone with lvl 2 Nxtl support and his suggestion was to take the device back to the retail location I purchased it at. I bought it last week so hopefully they'll be able to swap for me. The tech did confirm that an hour is much longer than it should have taken (I actually gave it more than an hour.) When I plug the device in now, Windows "sees" the Blackberry but the BB does not report its PIN.

I suspect that it's probably Win 98 and not the speed of the computer (600mhz)... but who knows. After all, there was no indication that the blackberry desktop software was doing anything but waiting for an acknowledgement from the device.

I'm going to try to get XP or W2k and run through it again. That way it will help show if it was the slower CPU or Win98 that caused it.